War Terrible War
by ShaunSeaman
Summary: The War preceding the demise of our society, and the creation of the districts. Set in the near future


The economy was bad.

Oil was either priced too high or too low. People were defaulting on debts, and spending or saving too much. The finer points are escaping me in retrospect, but I remember that the right people, the people who had the most, started losing it, and once that happened, the dominos fell quickly.

The news had been getting ridiculous preceding it, I remember that too. Each celebrity faux pas and political indiscretion was misshapen, spotlighted, and broadcast as an affront on a race, gender, or orientation - people were being pitted against each other by what a man with good hair and a woman with cleavage were spewing at them, so quickly that nobody had the time or the will to process it. Everyone was too busy worrying about doing more and being more to be bothered to consciously react to anything.

Interpersonal apathy trickled up to international disease, and the media giants were there to throw gas on the fire. Sides were galvanized against one another for whatever was easiest to use to galvanize them. Citizens put pressure on their politicians until they had no choice but to respond to popular demand in kind. Decisions were made that effected money at an international level. It went bad pretty quickly after that, but if anyone tries to tell you they weren't caught off guard when it finally happened, they're lying.

I was in Boston at the time, and had just engaged absurdly good sex with a flight attendant who I'd met online earlier in the afternoon. I'd pricked my finger on the brass lapel pin on from uniform while we were going at it, but didn't notice the blood until I was standing outside waiting for my car to come around to drive me home. A single drop of blood fell to the concrete, and as it hit, I heard the engines of the first wave of planes. I thought it was some kind of airshow at first; there were so many different ones and some looked so old. Then one plane shot down another. There was a pause, a few seconds of firing, and all at once the few planes that I could clearly recognize as "ours" started to shut down and free fall into the city.

I began to run as my car arrived then just as quickly, it sped away in perfect synchronization with all the others, even those that had been parked. They had to be doing 100 down the streets of the Back Bay, one right after another. There was horror in the faces of the passengers as one by one they realized that they couldn't override their AP. A few people broke out through the windows, but everyone I saw try that was just as soon run down by the cars behind them. One after another, the vehicles drove off of the roads and into the harbor to their death. Lemmings.

Then, almost as soon as it began, we finished it. An armada of airships, the likes of which none of us had seen, came out of the woodwork by the hundreds. Most were able to hover in place, many appeared to be unmanned, all of them technologically bounds ahead of where we'd thought we were. Our trillion dollar per year military budget had been well spent. They laid waste to the foreign planes which were ill equipped to match them. Then we nuked them. Everyone. Russia. China. Brazil. Mexico. India. The middle East. I hear how insane that sounds saying it out loud, but at the time I just remember thinking "Thank God we took care of that". A friend who had been interfacing with her parents in London right before the attack said she'd seen a flash of light behind them as the transmission cut out, though we never received official word of what happened to the allies.

The President declared martial law. FEMA somehow had a mandate to manage the population and we all got sent to camps for processing depending on which of the 13 contiguous FEMA districts we were in at the time. It's obvious after the fact that it was planned, but it was like a dream; I accepted it as reality when I was in it. There was no time to process what was going on and we'd been trained for decades not to process information for ourselves anyhow. Anyone who was Arab, Russian, Asian, or didn't speak English with an American accent was sent to a separate camp in District 14. When the dust finally settled and we started to rebuild, nobody asked where District 14 was or why nobody came back from it. We knew.

DC had been hit first, but a shadow government had been established in secret by Congress following the 9/11 attacks to ensure the nation would continue, and a new Capital had been built a mile under the Denver Airport, along with a series of tunnels that stretched across the remaining parts of the nation.

There was a general sense that the entire thing was conceived and executed by us, but nobody would dare say it, for fear of being sent to District 14. The war itself lasted for only a day. We were at the camps for a few weeks, and within a month, assigned to a District based on our skill sets to assist in the rebuilding. Damage to our communications infrastructure was sufficient to incapacitate the internet, but the news broadcasts started back up almost immediately and championed the salvation of our great nation. Nobody talked about it. We were so shell shocked, and it was easier to go back normal; to worrying about doing more, being more, than to all of a sudden start thinking for ourselves, and of how through our apathy and narcissism, we facilitated the demise of civilization. I just know that the economy was bad.


End file.
